Quantum communications is a promising technology that will play a fundamental role in the design of future networks. In fact, significant efforts are being undertaken by both the quantum physics and the classical communications communities on developing new architectures, solutions, and practical implementations of quantum communication networks (QCNs). Although these efforts led to various advances in today's technologies, there still exists a non-trivial gap between the research efforts of the two communities on designing and optimizing the performance of QCNs. For instance, most prior works by the classical communications community ignore important quantum physics-based constraints when designing QCNs. For example, many existing works on entanglement distribution do not account for the decoherence of qubits inside quantum memories and, thus, their designs become impractical since they assume an infinite lifetime of quantum states. In this article, we bring forth a novel analysis of the performance of QCNs in a physics-informed manner, by relying on the quantum physics principles that underly the different components of QCNs. The need for the physics-informed approach is then assessed and its fundamental role in designing practical QCNs is analyzed across various open research areas. Moreover, we identify novel physics-informed performance metrics and controls that enable QCNs to leverage the state-of-theart advancements in quantum technologies to enhance their performance. Finally, we analyze multiple pressing challenges and open research directions in QCNs that must be treated using a physics-informed approach to lead practically viable results. Ultimately, this work attempts to bridge the gap between the classical communications and the quantum physics communities in the area of QCNs to foster the development of the future communication networks toward the quantum Internet.

Physics-Informed Quantum Communication Networks: A Vision Toward the Quantum Internet

Quantum entanglement is a key resource in currently developed quantum technologies. Sharing this fragile property between superconducting microwave circuits and optical or atomic systems would enable new functionalities, but this has been hindered by an energy scale mismatch of >104 and the resulting mutually imposed loss and noise. In this work, we created and verified entanglement between microwave and optical fields in a millikelvin environment. Using an optically pulsed superconducting electro-optical device, we show entanglement between propagating microwave and optical fields in the continuous variable domain. This achievement not only paves the way for entanglement between superconducting circuits and telecom wavelength light, but also has wide-ranging implications for hybrid quantum networks in the context of modularization, scaling, sensing, and cross-platform verification. Description Editor’s summary Several platforms are under development for quantum computation, simulation, and metrology applications, with each platform operating at different operational wavelengths for optimized performance. For practical technologies, the reality will likely be a hybrid of platforms that require quantum entanglement to be generated and shared across platforms with a large energy disparity. Sahu et al. introduce an electro-optical device that allows the generation of quantum entanglement between microwaves (the operational wavelengths of superconducting circuits) with optical photons (the operational wavelength of long-distance quantum communication). Bridging platforms with more than five orders of magnitude difference in energy scales and maintaining the fragile entanglement provides a route to efficiently linking up hybrid quantum systems. —Ian S. Osborne An electro-optical device is developed to generate quantum entanglement between microwave and optical photon pairs.

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Entangling microwaves with light

This tutorial introduces the theoretical and experimental basics of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in thermal alkali vapors. We first give a brief phenomenological description of EIT in simple three-level systems of stationary atoms and derive analytical expressions for optical absorption and dispersion under EIT conditions. Then we focus on how the thermal motion of atoms affects various parameters of the EIT system. Specifically, we analyze the Doppler broadening of optical transitions, ballistic versus diffusive atomic motion in a limited-volume interaction region, and collisional depopulation and decoherence. Finally, we discuss the common trade-offs important for optimizing an EIT experiment and give a brief ‘walk-through’ of a typical EIT experimental setup. We conclude with a brief overview of current and potential EIT applications.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/acbc40/pdf

A practical guide to electromagnetically induced transparency in atomic vapor

To advance the full potential of quantum networks one should be able to distribute quantum resources over long distances at appreciable rates. As a consequence, all components in the networks need to have large multimode capacity to manipulate photonic quantum states. Towards this end, a multimode photonic quantum memory, especially one operating at telecom wavelength, remains a key challenge. Here we demonstrate a spectro-temporally multiplexed quantum memory at 1532 nm. Multimode quantum storage of telecom-band heralded single photons is realized by employing the atomic frequency comb protocol in a 10-m-long cryogenically cooled erbium doped silica fibre. The multiplexing encompasses five spectral channels - each 10 GHz wide - and in each of these up to 330 temporal modes, resulting in the simultaneous storage of 1650 modes of single photons. Our demonstrations open doors for high-rate quantum networks, which are essential for future quantum internet.

Quantum storage of 1650 modes of single photons at telecom wavelength

The squeezed cat state, an essential quantum resource, can be used for quantum error correction and slowing decoherence of the optical cat state. However, preparing a squeezed cat state with high generation rate, and effectively manipulating it, remain challenging. In this work, a high‐performance all‐optical in‐line squeezer is developed to prepare a squeezed cat state and manipulate the phase of the quadrature squeezing. This scheme has the advantages that the phase of the quadrature squeezing of the squeezed cat state can be manipulated by changing the working condition of the squeezer, and that a higher generation rate can be achieved via the deterministic squeezing operation of the in‐line squeezer. The generation rate of squeezed cat states reaches 2 kHz, the same as that of the initial cat state. The all‐optical in‐line squeezer proposed here removes the requirements of electro‐optic and opto‐electric conversions necessary for an off‐line squeezer, thus enabling high‐bandwidth squeezing operations on non‐Gaussian states. These results provide an efficient method to prepare and manipulate optical squeezed cat states, which makes a step closer to their applications in all‐optical quantum information processing.

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Experimental Preparation and Manipulation of Squeezed Cat States via an All‐Optical In‐Line Squeezer

Quantum networks play an extremely important role in quantum information science, with application to quantum communication, computation, metrology, and fundamental tests. One of the key challenges for implementing a quantum network is to distribute entangled flying qubits to spatially separated nodes, at which quantum interfaces or transducers map the entanglement onto stationary qubits. The stationary qubits at the separated nodes constitute quantum memories realized in matter while the flying qubits constitute quantum channels realized in photons. Dedicated efforts around the world for more than 20 years have resulted in both major theoretical and experimental progress toward entangling quantum nodes and ultimately building a global quantum network. Here, the development of quantum networks and the experimental progress over the past two decades leading to the current state of the art for generating entanglement of quantum nodes based on various physical systems such as single atoms, cold atomic ensembles, trapped ions, diamonds with nitrogen‐vacancy centers, and solid‐state host doped with rare‐earth ions are reviewed. Along the way, the merits are discussed and the potential of each of these systems toward realizing a quantum network is compared.

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Towards Real‐World Quantum Networks: A Review

A nanodiamond with an embedded nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is one of the experimental systems that can be coherently manipulated within current technologies. Entanglement between NV center electron spin and mechanical rotation of the nanodiamond plays a fundamental role in building a quantum network connecting these microscopic and mesoscopic degrees of motions. Here we present a protocol to asymptotically prepare a highly entangled state of the total quantum angular momentum and electron spin by adiabatically boosting the external magnetic field.

Dian‐Li Zhou

Papers

Towards Real‐World Quantum Networks: A Review

Preparing highly entangled states of nanodiamond rotation and NV center spin